If you want to get underneath the skin of White nationalists, check out how they react when genetic ancestry tests reveal the “bad news” that they are not 100 percent European.
That’s what a University of California, Los Angeles geneticist did for a project that culminated in a presentation of a paper in Montreal this week at the annual gathering of the American Sociological Association.
The paper found that genetic ancestry testing — or GAT — “troubles the boundaries and membership of white nationalism.” The paper is based on an examination of thousands of posts on Stormfront — a White nationalist online message board launched by former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard Don Black, a protégé of former KKK leader David Duke.
When genetic testing confirms White nationalists’ European ancestry, Stormfront users posted the results as “good news.”
“But bad news posts are another story,” states the paper by Dr. Aaron Panofsky, associate professor in the UCLA Institute for Society and Genetics, Public Policy, and Sociology, and Joan Donovan, who was a postdoc research fellow at the institute at the time. The “bad news” posts involved genetic testing results that turned up evidence of non-European DNA or otherwise questionable ancestry.
That matters to Stormfront users because the website states that members must be of “wholly European descent to be white.” In order to grasp the reach of Stormfront, consider the fact that the website logged over 17 million page views from October through December 2016 — the months before and after the election of Donald J. Trump as the President of the United States.
Panofsky said what he found most surprising is that White nationalists “spend a heck of a lot of time ‘repairing’ bad news.”
